Mostly about startups but sometimes about burritos too.

A World Give Day Surprise for Fatima

May 4th is World Give Day. It’s the one day a year where people around the world come together to support the causes that they care about most, whether that means giving money, giving their time, or perhaps just giving free hugs.

For this year’s World Give Day, I am holding a mentor-thon and giving all the money I raise to a little girl named Fatima. Fatima is 4 years old and battling leukemia in Los Angeles. Friends of the family started this GiveForward fundraising page to relieve some of the financial burden as they cope with the high medical bills. Fatima’s family doesn’t know we are helping and I think it would be awesome to surprise them with a big donation on World Give Day representing the collective generosity of all the awesome people on the Interwebz! My goal is to help make Fatima’s page rock! I’d love your help!

So how’s a Mentor-thon work? Good question! For the next 24 Hours, I will be using Clarity.FM to take as many phone calls as possible from anyone who wants startup advice. Whether your question is about business plans, raising seed capital, finding a co-founder, hiring your first employee. marketing, customer acquisition strategy, blogging, you name it. I’ll answer it.

The goal is to raise $500 for the Ortega family. All you have to do to help is go to my Clarity.FM page and click the button that says “call me now”. It’s $2 per minute and all the money is being donated to Fatima through the family’s GiveForward Page.

So that’s it. Give me a call!!!! Like ASAP!!! And if you don’t have any startup questions, ask me about burritos. And if you don’t have any startup or burrito questions, pay it forward this World Give Day by sharing this on Facebook or sending this along to someone who might. Let’s make this happen for Fatima!

Alternatively, if you think talking to me will be a real snoozer and you’d rather just give directly to Fatima, you can donate on her GiveForward fundraising page here —> http://www.giveforward.com/friendsoffatima

As an extra incentive to give, I’ll match up to $100 (in total) on donations that use the hashtag #WorldGiveDay in the donation comments. Let’s go Internet. Let’s make something amazing happen!

Thanks for your support and happy giving!

– ethan

PS – I hope this post inspires you to do something meaningful on World Give Day. Feel free to share your plans or idea in the comment section.

PPS – If you haven’t used Clarity.fm before it’s a super-cool website started by Canadian entrepreneur extraordinaire Dan Martell (sorry, no relation to the Model, Rick Martell of WWF lore). Basically, Clarity allows startup founders (or anyone really) to call up successful entrepreneurs to get advice. For instance, you want to call up Mark Cuban for advice? Boom! Here’s his profile. Give him a call.

Clarity is still in private beta, but there are already some really awesome entrepreneurs in the network like Dave McClure and Micah Baldwin. Holy crap, right? Imagine not having to deal intro emails and LinkedIn nonsense. Imagine actually using your phone for (gasp!) talking and not just emails and text messaging. Clarity.fm eliminates all the gatekeepers, and gives people direct access to the most bad-ass, nerd-celebrity entrepreneurs in the universe. I love the fact that it is democratizing mentorship and bringing back the phone call like it’s 1996. I only wish this service existed when we were first starting GiveForward.